Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1321294
11 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 20 DECEMBER 2020 OPINION Strengthening success, moving forward I have no doubt that our new investment initiative of residency will benefit all Mal- tese and Gozitans. I'm equally sure that we should resist any attempts to frustrate this important investment stream. The new initiative is an improvement on the one it replaces, the Individual Investor Programme, especially with its residence requirement. And, in introducing it, we are fully in line with the competencies the government is free to exercise under membership of the European Union. In designing it, we listened to concerns expressed by the European Commission. While some would have preferred that we abandoned the idea all together, I believe that would have been the wrong thing to do. We should not give up on our right to grant citizenship when it is so beneficial to our country. Indeed, we are ready to defend our case should any legal action be initiated. Every year the EU welcomes about two thirds of a million new citizens. Our new plan will add only 400 to that total. Unlike the vast majority of new EU citizens, the applicants under our initiative will be subject to in- tense scrutiny. They will be obliged to go through an in- depth due diligence exercise before they are even allowed to apply for Maltese citizenship. To begin with, they must have legal resi- dent status for three years or, if investing a higher amount, one year. Other changes, compared to the old IIP, include regulations limiting the number of agents, a ban on aggressive advertising and the removal of ministerial power to grant citizenship to individuals failing to meet the required criteria. The project will be administered by a new agency, Community Malta. The names of all individuals who obtain citizenship will still be published. In addition, the names of individuals who have their citizenship revoked will be published too. Community Malta will have an obliga- tion to keep monitoring applicants for the first five years after they are granted citi- zenship. It will also have the power to suspend or revoke agents' licenses in the event of a breach of the rules. We have engaged with the European Commission by listening to their concerns and addressing them. The new regulations have been pub- lished for all to study. They are robust; in fact, they are the most rigorous in the Eu- ropean Union. IIP delivered more than a 1.5 billion eu- ros for Malta. This investment bolstered the country's econom- ic sovereignty as the covid-19 pandemic turned our surplus in- to deficit. And it meant we could improve peo- ple's lives without placing a burden on taxpayers. €60 million is being spent on social hous- ing giving a higher standard of living to many families. €1m was made available for the latest technol- ogies for invasive in- terventions in cardiac surgery at Mater Dei and €10 million is be- ing used to enhance health centres. Just recently, €5 million was granted to Puttinu Cares to house the relatives of patients sent to Lon- don for treatment. Who could deny these are all worthy in- itiatives? There will always be naysayers, who want to stand in the way, but the granting of citizenship has been greatly beneficial for Malta and Gozo. We have been constructive by taking on board other views and producing a better plan than the IIP. Now we look forward to attracting more international entre- preneurs, who can invest in our country, while using investment wisely to raise the standard of living, improve education and bettering health care facilities for our communities. problem with that. They have been doing so for a long time. But I think we can find a way for all to share the area…" Now: for what it's worth, I myself happen to disagree with Grech on both those points (and also, while I'm at it, on his equally wishy-washy views on the Gozo tunnel project… not to mention his failure to take any visible stand on over-development, and a few other things beside). But the point here is not so much that I am personally disappoint- ed by these woefully predictable policy mistakes… it is that these positions make no sense whatso- ever, coming from an Opposition leader in the early 21st century. Let me put it this way: not only is Bernard Grech's stand on en- vironmental issues identical to that of Simon Busuttil before him – which, separately, forces us to confront the sheer futility of ex- pecting the next election result to be any different from 2017 – but (much more bizarrely) they are also identical to the official po- sition of the Labour government under Robert Abela. This, for instance, is from the Labour government's own state- ment in response to criticism of the Mizieb/L-Ahrax deal: "the agreement merely formalised and regularised what had already been in practice for decades"; and "the public would enjoy the same free access to the reserves as it al- ways had." And that is not merely a 'sim- ilar' position to the one taken by Bernard Grech in that inter- view… it is almost a direct 'copy- and-paste' of exactly the same arguments (in almost exactly the same words). Likewise, Grech's proposal for a 'referendum' on the Gozo tunnel issue, turns out to be nothing but a rehash of an idea first floated by former Gozo minister Anton Refalo – who, I need hardly add, was actually a representative of the Labour administration. On at least two environmental issues, then, there is no visible policy difference whatsoever be- tween the PN and the PL. Which also means that, when it comes to actually choosing between those two parties – in an election that cannot realistically be much more than a year and a half away - there is, quite frankly, no tangi- ble reason under the sun to prefer Bernard Grech's PN, to Robert Abela's Labour. The only difference would be that, instead of having a Labour government that consistently capitulates to the outrageous demands of every single power- ful lobby-group on the island – from hunters, to developers, to zoo-keepers, and beyond – we'd have a Nationalist government doing all the capitulating instead. I mean, honestly. You don't ex- actly need a Masters degree in Political Science, to understand that an Opposition party has to actually offer something slightly different from the current gov- ernment's policies (and, even more so, from the policies that proved so catastrophically disas- trous under its previous leader- ship) if it ever wants to get elected to power again… Alex Muscat Alex Muscat is Parliamentary Secretary for Citisenship and Communities We should not give up on our right to grant citizenship when it is so beneficial to our country. Indeed, we are ready to defend our case should any legal action be initiated